Arts Research Center
ARTS RESEARCH CENTER (ARC) of University of California Berkeley, Arts Humanities Division, is a think tank for the arts at the university. UC Berkeley, rated the #1 public university worldwide, is a place where the brightest minds from across the globe come together to explore, ask questions and improve the world.
ARC acts as a hub and a meeting place, a space for reflection where artists, scholars, curators, and civic arts leaders from a variety of disciplines can gather and learn from one another.
ETSF is an active partner in providing support for ARC’s multi-year initiative entitled Poetry and the Senses, headed by Dean of Arts and Humanities Sara Guyer, who also serves as President of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and director of The World Humanities Report; overseen by ARC’s faculty director, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English Beth Piatote, an Indigenous language activist and a founding member of luk’upsíimey/North Star Collective,a group dedicated to using creative expression for Nez Perce language revitalization; and managed by poet, artist, art administrator, and educator Laurie Macfee, ARC Associate Director.
Each of the Poetry and the Senses initiatives/fellows explores the relevance and urgency of lyrical making and storytelling in times of political crisis, and the value of engaging the senses as an act of care, mindfulness, and to create positive change. The Poetry and the Senses model will be expanding in 2023.
UC Berkeley occupies the unceded territory of the Ohlone peoples, and as a land grant university it benefits materially from the historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land. In calendar year 2023, ARC will create dialogues with two other public land-grant universities that also have significant, complex histories with Native territorial dispossession as well as with Indigenous education and outreach. The first is University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in spring 2023, and the second is Arizona State University, in fall 2023. ARC Poetry Fellows from UC Berkeley & the Bay Area will be in conversation with both fellowship cohorts from UH and ASU.
