UC Berkeley English Department

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.

In March 2010, we wrote about the return to Berkeley of the wildly successful play The Domestic Crusaders, by Wajahat Ali. Ali’s play was recently performed at the premiere theater venue of  the nation’s capital, the Kennedy Center — and to quite a response.  This video from the production shows both the first act  and Wajahat’s narration of the play’s Berkeley origin.  Additionally, the script of the play will be published by McSweeny’s next month; copies can be ordered here.