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Are you a graduate of the department or a current student? We would like to hear from you. Please e-mail ucbenglish@gmail.com.
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News, Announcements, and Events
Some links about alumni and faculty:
1. Young Jean Lee (who visited the Department as a Distinguished Alumna last Spring) has a new play out, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. It has gotten a lot of attention from critics of all stripes who have been polarized over the piece. A sample of reviews can be found at the following links:
New York Times
The New Yorker
http://travsd.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/lear/
2. Professor Scott Saul is making his own press as a commentator on the recent death of J. D. Salinger. The blog for the SFWeekly quotes Professor Saul in their piece on the significance of J. D. Salinger, and you can hear an conversation with him on the same topic here.
With typical virtuosity, English Professor D. A. Miller brought an audience that filled the Nestrick Room in Dwinelle Hall all too close to Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train on Friday February 12 as part of the Berkeley Film Seminar. Read full post… 
 In what follows, graduate student John Lurz reports on a recent event held at University Press Books at which Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer spoke about their new book, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory.Read full post…
 In what follows, graduate student Andrea Lankin reports on a recent talk given by Professor Vincent Gillespie on “Meat, Metaphor and Mysticism,” a provocative and enigmatic title for a talk that explores the role of the body in medieval culture. Read full post…
The English Department wishes everyone a safe and happy holiday. As the students depart for winter break, the department blog is also taking a short hiatus. We will be back online with our weekly posts when the new semester begins in mid-January.
Until then, we leave with you a classic holiday poem: Robert Burns’ “Auld Lang Syne.”
 In what follows, graduate student Rebecca Munson gives a brief account of the talk Professor John Kerrigan recently gave on “Shakespeare, Oaths and Vows.”Read full post…
On Friday November 20th, Wheeler Hall, the home of the English Department, was the scene of protest, as students took over classrooms on the second floor, and of a standoff between police and demonstrators across barricades in front of the building. The day was tense, and there were outbreaks of violence but, it appears, no major injuries. There will be inquiries into the use of force by the police. The following links to The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Daily Cal (with photos and video) provide details about the day’s events.
New York Times article
San Francisco Chronicle article
Daily Cal: Wheeler Hall Occupation Ends Peacefully
 On Monday, November 9, the English department continued its series, “Conversations with Distinguished Alumni,” in a discussion with alumnus David Corvo ’72, who is currently the Executive Producer of the prime time news magazine Dateline NBC. He was joined by Department Chair Sam Otter and Professor Namwali Serpell, who spoke with him about the the relationship between his study of English at Berkeley and his success as a broadcast journalist. [Read full post...]
 In what follows, graduate student Monica Soare reports about a recent meeting of the department’s Nineteenth-Century and Beyond Working Group, which hosted Professor Mary Favret from the University of Indiana. They discussed a chapter in Professor Favret’s new book War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. [Read full post...]
In what follows, graduate student Natalia Cecire reports on a recent poetry reading with Maurice Scully and Anne Tardos.[Read full post...]
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| People and Stories
The following is a brief profile of Shaymaa Mahmoud, an undergraduate English major who was part of a recent photo essay on being Muslim-American. Read full post…
In what follows, Kali Peterson (pictured below) describes the circuitous path she has taken from her BA in English from Berkeley to her decision to study and practice law.Read full post…
The English Department has recently launched the Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship in Poetry and Poetics, a one-year position for recent PhDs that allows them to further both their creative and critical projects. This year we have three Fellows: Margaret Ronda, Jessica Fisher and Jeremy Ecke. In what follows, the three poet-scholars talk about their current projects, the importance of this Fellowship and what makes Berkeley an especially rich place to write poetry and criticism.Read full post…
 This past semester, under the leadership of Professor Eric Falci, the department inaugurated a graduate student publication workshop. Designed as a forum for graduate students to receive feedback on their work-in-progress as they prepare that work for eventual publication, the workshop met five times in the fall 2009 semester, and plans to meet six or seven times this spring. Read full post…
 In what follows, Professor Nadia Ellis describes the singular role the English Department at Berkeley has played for alumnus Charlie Hallowell (pictured right, with his daughter Matilda) who owns two successful artisanal pizza restaurants in Oakland.Read full post…
Each fall the population of the English department is refreshed by an incoming class of graduate students. This year, we welcomed over 20 new students to Wheeler Hall. Richard Lee is one of the new PhD students who are making their way through the first semester of graduate work at Berkeley.[Read full post...]
In what follows, recent alumna Anna Inhofe describes the year she spent as an intern at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. She describes the myriad tasks that an intern must take on and offers a glimpse into the glamorous Kennedy Center Honors event which she helped to facilitate. [Read full post...]
Graduate students Charles Legere and Javier Huerta both live in Oakland and both write poetry. Now, after being approached by the website deepoakland.org, they’ve written some poetry about living in Oakland. [Read full post...]
As one of the larger departments at UC Berkeley (there are roughly 700 majors), the English Department can be a daunting place for an undergraduate trying to navigate the requirements of the major. While the Department has an Undergraduate Adviser on staff as well as a professor who counsels students, there is another resource for students that is somewhat less intimidating but no less “official,” namely the English Undergraduate Association (EUA).[Read full post...]
In what follows, Tiffany Tsao, who received her PhD in English this past Spring, reports on her life as a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech. She begins with an epigraph from Dante which, she feels, encapsulates her experience so far.
…what I sing will be that second kingdom,
in which the human soul is cleansed of sin,
becoming worthy of ascent to Heaven.
(Purgatorio, Canto I.4-6)[Read full post...]
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