News (Always tag)

Comp Lit Sophomore, Ava Ratcliff, (’26, also AGRS/Greek & Latin) won the Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to dive into the study of the Russian language. Ava looks forward to deepening her understanding of Russian this summer in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Ava began studying Russian, alongside Ancient Greek and Latin, as a freshman at Berkeley. She plans to use the skills she develops this summer to read nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature in its original language. Ava is driven by a passion for reading and sharing literature with others...

In Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation (University of California Press, 2024), Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and...

Professor Kronfeld (Ph.D., 2020)... also discusses her Berkeley background and, of course, Jazz! Read the article.

Earlier this year the Los Angeles... Review of Books (LARB) and Yefe Nof were thrilled to launch a new residency program dedicated to supporting emerging literary translators of exceptional promise. The inaugural crop of applications was a revelation, bringing us a dazzling variety of brilliant work, all of it deserving of support. After careful consideration, LARB and Yefe Nof are proud to name Laila Riazi as the first winner of the LARB + Yefe Nof Translation Residency competition.

During her two-week stay at Yefe Nof in Lake Arrowhead, California, this December, Laila Riazi will...