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News
On November 22, the English Department sent a petition to Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau and Chief of UC Police Department, Mitchell Celaya, strongly protesting the police violence against non-violent protestors on November 9.
On November 14, the English Department held this fall’s event in our “Conversations with Distinguished Alumni/ae” series. Jeffrey Berg (English ‘69), Chairman and CEO of International Creative Management, one of the world’s largest talent agencies, joined Professors Samuel Otter and Kevis Goodman in a lively conversation.
At 6:30PM today, Thursday, September 8, in 315 Wheeler Hall (Maude Fife Room), the 2011-2012 Holloway Series begins the autumn season in poetry with a reading featuring UC Berkeley’s own celebrated poets and teachers.
Chapter and Verse: Structures of Reading
University of California at Berkeley
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Associate Professor Nicholas Dames, Departments of Comparative Literature and English, Columbia University
A memorial service for Charles Muscatine, late Professor Emeritus of English, will be held at 11 a.m., Sunday, February 13, 2011, in the Pauley Ballroom of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union. A distinguished scholar of medieval literature, Muscatine was also well known as an advocate for educational reform and for his refusal to sign a state loyalty oath during the McCarthy era. He died last March, at the age of 89. The memorial service will be hosted by the UC Berkeley Department of English and the Muscatine family.
Two members of the UC Berkeley English Department have recently made big splashes in the national news scene.
Professor Ishmael Reed published an oped in the Dec 11, 2010 New York Times on “What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama.” Professor Reed has a recent book, Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, out on the same subject from Baraka Books.
Aaron Bady, an advanced graduate student who studies African literature in the department, made waves in the national conversation surrounding the recent WikiLeaks case. The virtuoso close reading of Julian Assange’s personal philosophy that Aaron posted on his blog, http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/, became a viral phenomenon, drawing more than ten thousand readers and links from some of the most prominent news media outlets in the country. His influence prompted The Atlantic to call him “The Unknown Blogger Who Changed the WikiLeaks Conversation.” The University has also published an account here.
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On November 1, a month before the announced release date, and because they were too excited to wait, Foxhead Books released The Drowned Library, Paul Kerschen’s first collection of short stories. I had the distinct pleasure recently of talking with Paul about The Drowned Library, and about writing in general, which he calls, “the least oppressive labor I have ever performed.”
 Occupy Cal and the Open University are just two ways students and faculty on campus have been choosing to meet some of the crises in higher education: diminished state funding for public higher education, the financialization of the public, and questions about the nature and function of education as a public good. In the English Department, we’ve redoubled our commitment to the study of language, believing this task to be central to protest …
We asked our most recent graduates to submit entries to an essay-writing contest on the topic of what they’ve done with their B.A. degrees in English, and we received over thirty entries. In her winning essay, “A Tale of Two Cities,” Lindsay King (Class of 2010) writes, “I have never been more convinced that literature is profound and sublime extension of the people and cultures which produce it, and had it not been for my undergraduate experience in both English and French, I do not know if I would have been able to come to appreciate or understand this reality as deeply as I currently do. Had I simply focused on what I was planning to do with my degrees rather than on who I was going to become, I know that I would not have grown into being the young woman that I am today….” Read the complete texts of Lindsay King’s winning essay and second place essays by Kaelan Connella, Adrienne D’Luna, and Ben Kahane.
Each year in the “Faculty Notes” section of the department newsletter, we list the most recent faculty accomplishments. In the same spirit of recognition and congratulation, here are only some of the many accomplishments of our graduate students from this past year.
On the weekend of October 15, 2011 former students of Cathy Gallagher from around the country convened to pay tribute to her mentorship and scholarship. Speakers — all of whom gave short, provocative, or poignant talks — included Mark Allison, Miriam Bailin, Trisha Urmi Banerjee, Ayelet Ben-Yishai, David Brewer, Ian Burney, Julie Carr, Arianne Chernock, Tina Choi, William Cohen, Alison Conway, Oz Frankel, Laura Green, Nicoletta Gullace, Daniel Hack, Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, Peter Logan, Annie McClanahan, Catherine Mitchell, Leslie Monstavicius, Maura O’Connor, Catherine Robson, Simon Stern, Rachel Teukolsky, Irene Tucker, Vlasta Vranjes, Toni Wein, Benj Widiss, Elizabeth Young, and Susan Zieger.
Click here for photographs from the conference.
Welcome back everyone!!
I’m not on campus today, so I don’t have the pleasure of seeing your beautiful, shining faces or feeding off your I’m So Rested From An Amazing Summer!! energy, but I did want to wish you all a very happy first day of the new semester.
Here’s some Ferris Bueller to help get you good and ready for the new year.
If you’ve ever wondered what your students were listening to on their iPods while they waltzed into class or what albums were the soundtrack to their writing, Professor Eric Falci clues us all in.
In an article for Food and Wine Magazine, our department’s own Karen Leibowitz writes, “We weren’t chefs—I was a graduate student and my husband, Anthony Myint, was a line cook—but we thought it would be fun to sublet a taco cart and sell “PB&Js,” sandwiches stuffed with pork belly and jicama. We set up shop at 21st and Mission in San Francisco and called ourselves Mission Street Food.” Karen answers some of my excited questions about how studying literature helped her first, manage a restaurant, then write a funky cookbook, with her husband.
If you studied English as an undergraduate, someone eventually asked you, “What are you going to do with that?” Candace Cunard ‘11 gives her answer.
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