Each month, the English Undergraduate Association profiles on an undergraduate student in the English major in the “Humans of Berkeley English” series. You can check out previous profiles by looking at the Humans of English. This post also appears on the EUA’s own site. If you are interested in being profiled yourself, please fill out this form. My name is Bailey...
Illustration by Joan Wong English PhD candidate Jane Hu has just published a scintillating reflection on contemporary Asian-Anglophone fiction in The New Yorker‘s “Page Turner” series. In the piece, Hu explores how a clutch of contemporary Asian-Anglophone authors, from Kazuo Ishiguro and Ed Park to Tao Lin and Weike Wang, have favored narrators who project an unusual sense of detachment or impersonality, often associated with the stereotype of Oriental...
—by Meaghan Allen His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. Ever since reading the last lulling, fainting line of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” in my senior year of high school, Ireland has haunted me....
READ MORE A Season in Sligo at the Yeats International Summer School
Each academic year, The English Department’s Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes several renowned and rising contemporary poets to campus to share and celebrate their work. This week, The Holloway Series and Mixed Blood invite you to join us for a reading and talk by Farid Matuk on Wednesday, November 8. The Mixed Blood talk, “Having Been of the Type: Taking Up Orlando Patterson’s Call...
READ MORE The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Farid Matuk and Jessica Laser
Professor Josie Saldaña’s recent book Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States received this year’s American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Prize for the most outstanding book published in American Studies. The prize committee’s citation: The committee selected Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States from well over 100 books that we reviewed. We...
READ MORE Josie Saldaña wins American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Prize
Wai Ho is a graduating English major at UC Berkeley. During the winter of 2016, she traveled to the Beinecke Library at Yale University to conduct archival research on Erasmus Darwin for a thesis. Her archival findings helped her develop her ideas on marginal discourse between unlikely speakers and addressees in botanical poetry and the personification of plant life. In...
Each academic year, The English Department’s Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes several renowned and rising contemporary poets to campus to share and celebrate their work. This week, the series welcomed Renee Gladman reading with Nicole Trigg. Renee Gladman is the author of ten books of poetry and prose, including her series of fictional works set in the imaginary city-state of Ravicka: Event Factory...
READ MORE The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Renee Gladman and Nicole Trigg
The Townsend Book Chat this week will feature Professor Jeffrey Knapp speaking about his new book, Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood, on Wednesday, September 27th, in the Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, from noon to 1 p.m. In Pleasing Everyone, Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and the incontrovertibly mass...
We live, many say, in an age of mass distraction — but distraction has long been with us. In Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention, Cal English professor David Marno considers how the Renaissance poetry of John Donne offered a model for battling distraction and for inviting a state of open attentiveness that was allied with grace. Asking why Christian prayer requires attention...
READ MORE Summer Reading Series – David Marno’s Death Be Not Proud
Professor D.A. Miller’s most recent book Hidden Hitchcock (University of Chicago Press, 2016) asks the reader to consider how Alfred Hitchcock works on two registers at once: as one of the most inviting filmmakers of our time, and as one of the most oblique. Miller argues that while the filmmaker’s “public style” has made him a favorite of audiences around the world,...
READ MORE Summer Reading Series – D.A. Miller’s Hidden Hitchcock
Professor Georgina Kleege was recently featured on PBS News Hour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series, as well as in the first installment of LightHouse Interpoint, a new weekly literary supplement from LightHouse for the Blind; her article for the series is entitled, “On Being Who I Am: My Life as a Tall Blind Woman.”
READ MORE Professor Georgina Kleege featured on PBS, LightHouse Interpoint series
The fable of the tar baby is one that spans both centuries and continents; as far back as the late 1800’s and across Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia, you can find the simple tale of a fox ensnaring a rabbit using a life-like figurine made of tar as punishment for stealing the former’s crops. This is more than a folk...
READ MORE Summer Reading Series – Bryan Wagner’s The Tar Baby: A Global History
Each year, the Department Citation is awarded to one outstanding graduating senior who is recognized by faculty nomination as having produced exceptionally high caliber work as an English Major. The following speech was given by this year’s winner, Jason Bircea, at the department’s May graduation ceremony on May 20th, 2017. Thank you chairman. Hello everyone. My name is Jason and I’m incredibly honored to be able...
READ MORE Jason Bircea Delivers 2017 Department Citation Commencement Address
Meaghan Allen (’17) was one of three students chosen to speak at the English Department’s 2017 Commencement Ceremony on May 20th, 2017. What follows is the text of her address. Aude sapere — Dare to know. From Immanuel Kant’s “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784) and later Michel Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment?” (1984) two hundred years later, summoning an individual...
READ MORE “Dare to Know,” Meaghan Allen’s 2017 Commencement Speech
Auzeen Abdi (’17) was chosen to speak at the English Department’s 2017 Commencement Ceremony on May 20th, 2017. What follows is the text of her address. Good afternoon fellow English students! Can you believe it? We finally did it! Whether you’ve been here four years, two years, longer or less, we’ve been dreaming of this day where there are no texts...
READ MORE “Fail Again. Fail Better.” Auzeen Abdi’s 2017 Commencement Speech
