Composer and performer Matthew Taylor is a new faculty member in Music. He has released his first full-length album, Life Returns, written during the pandemic to signal the coming of spring and celebrate human resilience. The evening-length work was recorded live in 2022.
His work includes concert and chamber music as well as online streaming projects such as Postcards to the Met, which was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has accrued over half a million views on Instagram.
The Art and Ethnography working group is an experimental research collaborative focused on the ethnographic exploration of global art and media with perspectives from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, ethnomusicology, and political science.
The working group aims to push the boundaries of interdisciplinary dialogue, critically exploring the capacity of media and aesthetics as part of a mixed-methods ethnographic methodology.
Faculty Books
Bear's-Eye View is a chronicle of students' engagement with the vibrant humanities culture at the Townsend Center and across the Berkeley campus. Each semester our undergraduate humanities writer soaks up the wealth of humanities events and writes about what they've learned.
Our Spring 2025 writer was Emma Murphree, a senior from Monterrey. She tackled topics including illness and isolation in the films of Todd Haynes, Jaron Lanier's skeptical relationship to A.I. and social media, and the ways in which digital media affects our perception of war.