2019 Graduate Certificate Recipients

Find out more about the Graduate Certificate here.

 

Laura Belik

PhD Architecture
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Borderwall Urbanism (core studio)
Urban Theory, CYPLAN 284
Portraits of "Outsiders." A Look at a Range of Excluded Others in Brazilian Literature and Film, PORTUG 275

Laura Belik is interested in questions of urbanism, politics of space and urban democracy, focusing on Brazil and Latin America.

 

Ree Botts

PhD African Diaspora Studies
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts, and Public Space (core seminar)
Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria (core studio)
National Bodies, Sexual Subjects, ETHSTD 250

Ree Botts is a poet, artist and activist from Philadelphia, PA pursuing a PhD in African Diaspora Studies. She received her MA from UCLA in African American Studies and her BA from Spelman College in Sociology and Anthropology.

 

Giuseppina Forte

PhD Architecture
Global Urban Humanities Initiatve courses taken:
Mexico City: Material, Performance and Power (core studio)
Urban Theory, CYPLAN 290C
Cities and Citizenship, ANTHRO 250

Giuseppina Forte is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture. Her research focuses on urban politics, inequality, and epistemologies of architecture and urbanism. She is currently investigating the urban peripheries as sites of radical politics, subjectivities and citizenship production, taking São Paulo, Brazil, as an extended case study. As an architect, she participated in the design of the multi-awarded “Center for the Wellbeing of Women” (Burkina Faso) advocating against female genital mutilation. As a Fulbright-Hays fellow, Giuseppina is visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo, in the Department of History of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU-USP) and affiliated with the Laboratory of Other Urbanisms.

 

Samantha Gebb

M.Arch Option 3
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts, and Public Space (core seminar)
Borderwall Urbanism (core studio)
Foundations in Performance Theory, THEATER 201A

Sam Gebb is a designer and dancer whose work explores human kinesthetic experience and agency in the built environment. She received a BA in Architecture and a Certificate in Dance from Princeton University in 2014 and is currently pursuing Masters in Architecture and Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley.

 

Sourabh Harihar

MA Global Studies 
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts, and Public Space (core seminar)
Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria (core studio)
Sufism, SSEASN 250

Sourabh Harihar is studying for his MA in Global Studies at Berkeley and holds degrees in civil and ocean engineering from TU Delft (Holland) and the Indian Institute of Technology. In his previous years as a management consultant and a Young India Fellow, he has engaged with projects relating to smart city planning and urban informality in Indian cities. He is pursuing the GUH Certificate as he strongly believes that an urban humanities perspective is extremely critical and valuable to understanding urban development, particularly in the Global South.

 

Xander Lenc

PhD Geography
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Populism, Art and the City (core seminar)
Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria (core studio)
Spaces of Queer Theory, ARCH 239

What is the relationship between California’s urban development and the management of the prisons along the city’s margins? My work points to moments where wardens, policymakers, and activists borrow concepts from urban debates about security, density, and human behavior to manage or reform prisons. Furthermore, my research assesses the importance of prisoner labor for the development of dams, power stations, and other forms of infrastructure on the fringe of the urban network.

 

Kerby Lynch

PhD Geography
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts and Public Space (core seminar)
Lagos Studio (core studio)
Urban Theory, CYPLAN 284

Kerby Lynch is a current PhD student in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. Their research interests are in archival theory, literary cartographies and black lesbian subjectivities.

 

Valentina Rozas-Krause

PhD Architecture
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
City of Memory (core seminar)
Art+Village+City in the Pearl River Delta (core studio)
Mexico City: Spaces/Cultures/Histories, ARCH 139/239

Valentina Rozas-Krause is a PhD candidate in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an architect with a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.  In 2008, she was awarded first place in a public competition to design “Memorial Patio 29,” which was inaugurated in 2010. Her project to transform Chile's National Stadium into a public park, designed with Teodoro Fernandez Architects, was awarded first place in the “Parque de la Ciudadanía” competition (2011). Valentina has published two books. The first, Ni Tan Elefante, Ni Tan Blanco, is an urban, architectural and political history of the National Stadium in Chile (Ril, 2014). The second is the co-edited volume Disputar la Ciudad (Bifurcaciones, 2018) which deals with spatial strategies of oppression, resistance, memory and reparation within varying urban contexts. These join peer-reviewed articles in History & Memory, Latin American Perspectives, Anos 90, ARQ, Revista 180, Cuadernos de Antropología Social, and Bifurcaciones alongside a chapter in the forthcoming edited volume Neocolonialism and Built Heritage (Routledge, 2020). She recently received the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2019-2020 to complete her dissertation "Memorials and the Cult of Apology."

 

Sophia Sobko

PhD Education
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts and Public Space (core seminar)
Borderwall Urbanism (core studio)
Social Practice: Critical Site and Context, ART 163

Sophia Sobko is an artist, educator and PhD student in the Graduate School of Education. In her trans-disciplinary work she employs participatory pedagogical and arts-based practices to understand and challenge structures and ideologies of white supremacy. Her current research involves the case study of post-Soviet Jewish immigrants negotiating whiteness under U.S. settler colonialism and neoliberalism. She is particularly interested in the ways that post-Soviet Jewish trauma and desire interact with U.S. political structures toward the forging of revised white, Jewish ways of being.

 

Connie Zheng

MFA Art Practice
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Art, Populism and the City (core seminar)
Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria (core studio)
Series in Comparative Transnational Theories and Methods--Global Refugees, ETHSTD 240

Connie Zheng is an artist and writer currently pursuing her MFA in Art Practice at UC Berkeley. She uses the dialogue between text, drawing, painting and time-based media as a conduit through which to consider the environment of the media and the media of the environment, and these investigations tend to center on the visual culture around environmental crisis and economies of waste and creative reuse. She received her BA in Economics and English from Brown University and worked as a researcher before beginning graduate school. Here, she writes about her current practice and research on cardboard is influenced by the GUH course, Populism, Art and the City.

 

Find out more about the Graduate Certificate here.