Author: Darrend Brown

On a recent Thursday evening, the English Department gathered in the Maude Fife Room on the third floor of Wheeler Hall for the annual Charles Mills Gayley lecture, the department’s highest honor. The speaker that evening was Professor Ian Duncan, an expert in Victorian literature and Scottish Romanticism, whose talk was entitled “Darwin’s Voyage.” Read full post…

In what follows, graduate student Marcelle Maese-Cohen gives a brief overview of a the talk, entitled “Situating Feminism,” that Columbia professor and world-famous critic Gayatri Spivak gave at Berkeley in February. Read full post…

The English Department is pleased to announce the Peter and Megan Chernin Mentorship Program, a new initiative that will build stronger and more informal connections among undergraduates, graduate students and faculty. Read full post…

What follows is an account of a recent event, sponsored by a number of campus literary magazines and the newly-formed Solidary Alliance , in which students, faculty and community members came together for a poetry reading that expressed the frustration and outrage at the recent cuts to education in California. Read full post…

A staged reading of English department graduate Wajahat Ali’s critically-acclaimed play Domestic Crusaders will be performed in Berkeley on April 10 and 11 as part of the ongoing “Islam Today” program run by Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for South Asia Studies, and Center for Southeast Asia Studies. Read full post…

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…