A Liberal Arts Curriculum
The L&S Division of Undergraduate Studies is dedicated to creating and overseeing curricular and co-curricular programs that nurture rich intellectual relationships between faculty members and students. In the best tradition of a liberal arts education, our programs encourage students to explore new worlds of knowledge. Our programs and courses serve students in every college and school across campus at every stage of their undergraduate careers, from the initial years of intellectual exploration through the process of finding and pursuing an in-depth academic focus.
Hallmarks of the L&S liberal arts curriculum are the small-group freshman and sophomore seminars and the Big Ideas Courses that bring together prominent professors from divergent disciplines around a single vital concept. These teaching jewels offer undergraduates in their initial years of intellectual exploration a great way to explore new and exciting fields of study.
Featured Faculty
The Berkeley faculty who teach in our programs are not only superb teachers, they are also distinguished experts in their fields. Our esteemed faculty include:
Carol Christ
11th Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley
Carol Christ was the 11th Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. She previously served as President of Smith College from 2002 to 2013. She teaches freshman seminars on Nineteenth Century Fiction and the Boundaries of the Human, Monsters and Robots, and Frankenstein and Its Rewritings.
Saul Perlmutter
Nobel Laureate
Saul Perlmutter received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. He led one of the two research teams that simultaneously discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe. He co-teaches the Big Ideas Course Sense & Sensibility & Science.
Nikki Jones
Michael J. Hindelang Award
Nikki Jones received the 2020 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology (ASC) for her book The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption. She co-teaches the Big Ideas Course Prison.
Randy Schekman
Nobel Laureate
Randy Schekman received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his role in revealing the machinery that regulates the transport and secretion of proteins in our cells. He teaches freshman seminars on Insulin as a Window on Discovery in Biology and The Challenge of Neurodegenerative Disease.
Michael Manga
MacArthur Fellow
Michael Manga received a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2005. He studies the geological processes that shape Earth’s surface. He teaches freshman seminars on The Day the World Exploded: The 1883 Eruption of Krakatoa, Geoscience in the Movies, and Geoscience in the News.
Whendee Silver
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Lifetime Fellow
Whendee Silver was elected lifetime fellow of AAAS “for distinguished contributions to determine the biogeochemical effects of climate change and human impacts on the environment, and the potential for mitigating these effects.” She co-teaches the Big Ideas Course Climate Change and the Future of California.
Steven M. Kahn
Dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences
Steven M. Kahn is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is an experimental astrophysicist and cosmologist. He teaches freshman seminars on Big Science.
Leadership and Team
Sabrina Agarwal
Interim Dean of the Division of Undergraduate Studies, College of Letters & Science
Dr. Sabrina Agarwal is professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her B.A., M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on bioethics; sex and gender-related changes in bone quantity and quality; and the relationship of those changes to social identity and inequality, embodiment, developmental plasticity, disability, and health. Professor Agarwal is a 2020 recipient of Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award and a 2015 recipient of the Graduate Division’s Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs. As an interdisciplinary scholar whose work sits at the intersection of three L&S divisions, Professor Agarwal has a strong commitment to Berkeley’s mission, and ensuring that students receive a broad, rigorous liberal arts and sciences education grounded in equity, inclusion, and a genuine sense of community and belonging in the College.
Jessica Stewart
Interim Director
Jessica Stevenson Stewart is the Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarships (OURS). A former Haas Scholar, she received both her BA and PhD from the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. Jessica specializes in the intellectual cultures of collecting in sixteenth-century Northern Europe. Her research, often focusing on the visual culture of international trade in the early modern world, has been supported by fellowships from the Center for the Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA), the Kress Foundation, the Fulbright Administration, and the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF). An advocate for interdisciplinary research as well as project- and object-based inquiry, Jessica has taught extensively from museum collections, first as a Kress Fellow for the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and subsequently as the Associate Curator for Academic Engagement at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center. She is currently working on articles on German mining and the invention of landscapes, on knowledge formation in Splendor Solis, an alchemical manuscript, and on the emergence of global art markets in the Netherlands.
Heather Mäkiharju
Academic Engagement Policy Analyst
Heather Mäkiharju is the Division’s Academic Engagement Policy Analyst. She provides student program coordination and administration as well as curriculum planning and assessment. She has over a decade of experience working in higher education. Prior to joining the University of California, Berkeley, Heather held positions in the College of Engineering and the Medical School at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. In her free time, she enjoys running and indoor cycling. Heather earned her BA in Psychology & History from Mount Holyoke College and her MA in Higher Education Administration with a concentration in Academic Affairs & Student Development from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.
Land Acknowledgment
UC Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County.