Dr. Amelia Barili holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese Department and taught previously at the Spanish Department at UC Davis. She has been distinguished with many awards and honors such as the UCB Chancellor’s Award for Public Service, a Fulbright Scholarship, the East Bay Sanctuary Distinguished Partnership award, the Chancellor’s Community Partnership Grant, three UC Berkeley Language Center Fellowships, several Teaching Lecturer Fellowships and Professional Development Grants, a Global Urban Humanities Fellowship and, most recently, a Creative Discovery Grant. Barili is often a presenter at pedagogical conferences and at the Teaching Innovation and Reinvention Showcase Day organized by the UCB Center for Teaching and Learning, where she shares with UCB colleagues the results of the pedagogical research she has done with her fellowships and grants and through the engaged scholarship and practice she and her students do with the Latino community of the Bay Area.
For her work of over a decade, in 2008 Barili received the Chancellor’s award for Public Service. Her UCB undergraduate and OLLI older adult students have volunteered more than 15,000 hours during the years she has worked with Santuario, Oakland International High School, Refugee Transitions, English in Action, I-Host program of I-House, and Casa Mora.
Barili also teaches at the UCB Osher Life Long-Learning Institute courses on “Volunteering, Meditation and Neuroplasticity”, and teaches contemplative practices at the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery and other institutions.
Identity from the Margins, Anzaldua, Arguedas, Shamanism, Borges, Buddhism and Cognitive Science, Global Urban Humanities; Cities as Texts; Intercultural Citizenship, Intercultural Service Learning, Neurobiology and Cognitive Science as Basis of Autonomous Learning.
