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UC Berkeley History of Art Department

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09/24/2026

Congratulations to Shiben on having his monograph, Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press, 2025), shortlisted for the MSA Book Prize for 2026. The judges commended Shiben for his "strikingly original study, [showing] how modernists influenced by esoteric movements planned urban spaces to nurture a new global consciousness."

Each year, the Modernist Studies Association recognizes publications that make a significant contribution to modernist studies.

09/20/2026

Other Stories—A Genealogy for the Present opens in New York

Associate Professor Atreyee Gupta serves as Curatorial Advisor for Other Stories—A Genealogy for the Present, the inaugural exhibition at AINA Gallery, Aicon Art’s next chapter, opening in New York on October 1, 2026.

Taking Rasheed Araeen’s landmark 1989 exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain as a point of departure, Other Stories brings together modern and contemporary artists from South Asia, Africa, and their diasporas. The exhibition considers how artistic genealogies are formed, displaced, and reassembled across geographies, histories, and generations, while asking how inherited narratives of modern and contemporary art might be reconsidered from the vantage point of the present.

Other Stories—A Genealogy for the Present will be on view at AINA Gallery, 550 West 29th Street, New York, through December 5, 2026.

09/09/2026

The South Asia Art Initiative is pleased to announce the opening of Private Frontiers: Media Legacies of the Cold War, bringing together new and recent photography, video, and installation by Naeem Mohaiemen, Prajakta Potnis, TJ Shin, and Tiffany Sia.

Drawing on television broadcasts, popular music, and other forms of mass media, the exhibition examines how politics was articulated and contested through culture during the second half of the twentieth century—and how those histories continue to shape the present.

Private Frontiers asks how media technologies shaped perceptions of security, threat, and national belonging during the Cold War, and how their legacies continue to inform our relationship to media today.

Organized by BAMPFA and curated by Tausif Noor (), Assistant Curator, and Atreyee Gupta (), Associate Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of History of Art.

On view September 9–December 13, 2026.

Learn more and plan your visit via the link in bio.

Image: Prajakta Potnis (), still life, 2009. Digital print on archival paper. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.

07/15/2026

The Department of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, invites applications for an Assistant Professor in Arts of the Medieval World (tenure-track).
Read the entire job description here: https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05462

06/26/2026

Zamansele Nsele has won a Hellman Foundation fellowship.

Zamansele has won the prestigious Clark Fellowship in the Society of Hellman Fellows to support her book Nostalgia before and After Apartheid: Archival art and the figuration of the Black Subject. Congratulations!

The Society of Hellman Fellows is an endowed program that provides research funding to promising assistant professors who show the capacity for great distinction in their fields. The program was launched in 1995 at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego and has since expanded organically. Made possible by the Hellman Fellows Fund, these fellowships are open to faculty across a broad range of disciplines, including the arts and humanities, social sciences, and STEM. Since its founding, more than 1,900 early-career faculty have received Hellman Fellowships, with many advancing to become renowned researchers, department chairs, and MacArthur “genius” grant recipients. In 2020, celebrating 25 years of impactful funding, the Hellman family generously established an endowment to allow the program to continue in perpetuity across all ten UC campuses.

06/23/2026

Our 2026 annual newsletter is now available:
https://arthistory.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/newsletter_2026.pdf

Greetings to Alumni, Students, Faculty, Staff, Supporters, and Partners,

As we close out another academic year — and as I concluded my three-year term as Chair— I continue to marvel at our department’s ability to remain focused on our mission and responsive to dynamic conditions.

Please peruse our annual newsletter to understand what I mean. Across these pages you will find much to inspire. New exhibitions, new programming, new books, new courses, and new internship programs; together they build the skills of slow looking and close reading in our students and demonstrate the impact of our faculty across the field of art history.

Indeed, we remain committed to crafting globally relevant art histories, even as we propel globally relevant art futures.

Our thanks to all members of History of Art’s local, national, and international community. It has been a privilege to be in service to all of you, and we are ever grateful for your support and energy as we stay the course.

Fiat Lux,

Shannon Jackson
Chair, History of Art

05/19/2026

Congratulations to Andrea Jung-An Liu, Angela Pastorelli-Sosa, and Michele D’Aurizio, who received their doctoral degrees.

04/06/2026

COAPAN: Smuggling, Fire, and Resistance

Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Noon
308A Doe Library

Federico Cuatlacuatl presents a selection of his most recent artistic productions highlighting spatial and temporal emancipatory practices for enduring ongoing displacements. Building on his experience as a formerly undocumented immigrant and DACA holder, and stemming from Nahua histories in Cholula, his work celebrates Nahua diasporic resilience, futurisms, and transborder Indigeneity.

Speaker: Federico Cuatlacuatl, Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor Department of Art, University of Virginia

04/03/2026

Atreyee Gupta | Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India

April 17, 2026
5-6:30 pm PST
10 Stephens Hall
LIVESTREAM: On FB at SAAIatUCBerkeley

A talk by Atreyee Gupta, Associate Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art, on her new book, Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India (Yale University Press, 2025), that offers a revelatory look at modernism in India, exploring art’s role in decolonization and aesthetic discourse across the Global South.

Aglaya Glebova, Associate Professor of History of Art and Faculty Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies will serve as discussant.

Event moderated by Munis D. Faruqui, Director, Institute for South Asia Studies; Director, Global, International & Area Studies (GIAS); Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies; Professor, South & Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley.

03/09/2026

History of Art Stoddard Lecture: “Murmurations: Lines of Flight between Omnicide, Groundwork and Communism” by Nicholas D. Mirzoeff

Thursday, March 12, 2026
5 p.m.
308A Doe

Abstract: Settler colonialism has always envisaged, erased and extracted land from a single viewpoint in the air, whether that of perspective or the drone. In this presentation, I anticipate that I will think about how to activate and salvage the visible in the time of omnicide from the air. Such activation first enables the common recognition that sustains solidarity. That then allows us to map time-space by means of what I have called “groundwork,” the (re)formation of common ground from what has been made into terra nullius (nothing land). From such ground, a line of flight can be drawn into the air, so as to assemble in murmurations, the spontaneous assemblage of birds. The murmuration’s way of seeing, an other-than-human model for human freedom, is a four-dimensional non-hierarchical convivial democracy.

Speaker Bio: Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor and Chair in the Dept. of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. His most recent books include White Sight: Visual Practices and Politics of Whiteness (2023) and To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7th (2025). His writing has also appeared in venues like the Guardian, the Nation and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He often collaborates with the Bay Area Center for Convivial Research and Analysis.

Image: Details from D’Hondecoeter and Weenix. Inspired by Jelena Juresa

Address

416 Doe Library, #6020
Berkeley, CA
94720

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm
Tuesday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm
Wednesday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm
Thursday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm
Friday	9am - 12pm
	1pm - 4pm

Telephone

+15106425511

Website

http://arthistory.berkeley.edu/

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