Yonatan Binyam is a new faculty member in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. He is at work on a book exploring the use of race and racism as analytic concepts in the study of ancient texts. Before coming to Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
The Townsend Center is pleased to support Clio’s Scroll, the Berkeley undergraduate history journal, which celebrates its 45th anniversary. Produced twice yearly by students in the Department of History, the journal provides undergraduates with the opportunity to publish outstanding historical scholarship.
Faculty Books
To understand how storytelling in music has changed over time, A&H faculty member and Berkeley Center for New Media director Tom McEnaney and his colleagues used machine learning to analyze more than 5000 pop songs that made the Billboard Hot 100 list between 1960 and 2024.
One might expect that storytelling in pop songs peaked in the 1960s, with the music of folk singers like Bob Dylan. However, the study found that narrativity in songs has increased since the 1990s, due in large part to the rise of hip-hop.