Author: Darrend Brown

Hannah Zeavin’s The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy

Published date March 4, 2022

In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021), English Department Lecturer Hannah Zeavin offers a history of psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud’s treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions. While therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation, psychotherapy has...

Bad Seed: Monstrosity, Horror, and the Inhuman in Children’s Literature

Published date February 15, 2022

Prof: Poulomi Saha Course Description: From cannibalistic witches to sadistic parents to dystopian hellscapes, children’s literature is rife with terrifying figures and dark themes. This class will look at forms of monstrosity, deviance, and horror within a variety of texts that are so often figured as cute, sweet, or safe, and explore why it is that there is such pleasure...

Harlem Renaissance

Published date February 15, 2022

Professors: Bryan Wagner and Christine Palmer This course will explore the social, cultural, political, and personal awakenings in the culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Roughly between 1918-1930, in the midst of racial segregation and increasing anti-Black violence, Black American writers reclaimed the right to represent themselves in a wide range of artistic forms and activist movements. We’ll consider how artists...

D.A. Miller’s Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD

Published date February 9, 2022

In Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD (Columbia University Press, 2021), Professor D.A. Miller watches digitally restored films by directors from Mizoguchi to Pasolini and from Hitchcock to Honda, looking to find not only what he saw in them as a young man, but also what he was then kept from seeing by quick camerawork, normal projection speed, missing...

Dorothy Hale’s The Novel and the New Ethics

Published date January 10, 2022

In the age of visual culture, why write fiction? For a wide array of contemporary writers from Toni Morrison to J.M. Coetzee, Professor Dorothy Hale suggests, the answer lies in the novel’s ethical power. For these writers, novels not only illuminate ethical action in complex social worlds, but also task writers and readers, through the narrative problem of character representation,...

Cindy Weinstein’s Finding the Right Words

Published date December 2, 2021

In Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain, Cindy Weinstein (PhD ’89) reflects on her time as a PhD student in the Berkeley English department, which coincided with her father’s struggle with dementia. Her father was only 58; the first symptom was his difficulty to find words —an especially charged issue for Weinstein because of...

Thomas Farber’s Acting My Age

Published date November 18, 2021

In Acting My Age, Thomas Farber reflects, with wit and insight, on his own mortality as well as on the impending extinction of vital presences in the natural world, from coral reefs to snow leopards. The author of over two dozen wide-ranging books of fiction, nonfiction, and epigrams, Farber teaches creative writing in the English department. The following excerpt from...

Writing Race: Faulkner and His Progeny

Published date September 10, 2021

Welcome: The English Department welcomes you to “Writing Race: Faulkner and his Progeny,” and I look forward to meeting you via Zoom on the first Wednesday of the month. —Mark Danner “The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously said. “It is not even past.” In our time of racial turmoil, few High Modernist writers feel more contemporary. Faulkner managed to...

Modernity and the Films of the Coen Brothers

Published date September 9, 2021

Welcome to the black comedy of the Coen brothers. We’ll concentrate on three films, starting with their first, Blood Simple (1984), a neo-noir, influenced by film noirs of the 40’s and 50’s. But it is also a post-modern text about uncertainty, misunderstanding, and other films. See you on October 4th, Best, Julia Bader Through films ranging from Miller’s Crossing and...

Remembering Rebecca Munson

Published date August 18, 2021

Rebecca Munson passed away on Friday, August 13th. Rebecca was a recent (2015) graduate of our PhD program, and had been working as Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Education at Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities. The Center has published a memorial notice, https://cdh.princeton.edu/updates/2021/08/15/rebecca-munson/. A contribution from James G. Turner. After hearing the shocking news I looked through hundreds of Rebecca’s...

An Interview with Susan Schweik

Published date April 6, 2021

Classically academic jobs are few and far between. At a place like Berkeley, you have to be trained to be a professor (and actually be one) before you are in a position to be an assistant or associate dean. At some other schools, it might be a career path of its own, separately. But I believe you should understand the work of faculty from inside before you move into this level of administration. Working on the administrative side….

An Interview with Kathleen Donegan

Published date April 6, 2021

Don’t be afraid to commit yourself to visions that are much bigger than you could ever realize by yourself. Your sustained commitment to the idea will have the effect of bringing other people along, and they will dedicate their own skills and resources to the project. When you see gaps or problems or absences, always ask “What if…” and allow yourself to imagine a solution that will reach out to people and offer them….

An Interview with Hertha D. Sweet Wong

Published date April 6, 2021

I think the appropriate reason to go into administration is from a desire to make something (e.g., experiences, processes, functionality) better. I see it as a mode of service. I would encourage undergraduate women who are interested in higher education administration, to get involved early (as a volunteer, intern, or committee member) in organizations or institutions where they can both contribute their insights and gain experience….

Dear English Department – A reintroduction to the Simpson Literary Project

Published date February 19, 2021

Dear UC Berkeley English Department, It’s nice to meet you, again. We are the Simpson Literary Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting authors, and enhancing the lives of readers, writers, educators, and students in communities across California and the nation. Our story begins in Wheeler Hall, where our founder Joseph Di Prisco completed his...

The Other Melville (Professor Samuel Otter, English 190)

Published date January 21, 2021

Welcome: The English Department welcomes you to “The Other Melville,” and I look forward to meeting you via Zoom and to talking about Melville’s fiction. —Samuel Otter Most readers know the works of Herman Melville through his now-famous Moby-Dick. But Melville wrote a range of compelling fiction and poetry before and after Moby-Dick. The “Read Along with Berkley English” component...