News – The Wheeler Column

April 23, 2020

Nadia Ellis Wins the 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award

Professor Nadia Ellis is one of four UC Berkeley faculty members to win the 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award. The Distinguished Teaching Award is the campus’s most prestigious honor for teaching and is intended to recognize individual faculty for sustained performance of excellence in teaching. Above and beyond an individual exemplary class, this kind of sustained excellence in teaching incites intellectual...

March 31, 2020

“Quarantine” Book List – Curated by the UC Berkeley English Department

Earlier last week, I reached out to English department faculty members and grad students to gather book recommendations to explore during this time of uncertainty. The selections range from fantastical escapes to tragicomedies, to apocalyptic plots that feel all too relevant to what we are experiencing today. We hope that this list will inspire you to find comfort in the...

October 24, 2019

Habitually Holloway: In Praise of Poetry

Habitually Holloway: In Praise of Poetry by: Giovanna Lomanto Even before the event, the room buzzed with anticipation as the awaiting audience waited eagerly for the introductions to begin. The reading as a phenomenon was social, especially in the front end of the night; in the Maude Fife, a flush of chatter greeted me from the far side of...

May 30, 2019

Katie Schramm attends University of California Academic Advising Conference

The University of California Academic Advising Conference is an annual conference aimed at providing professional development to strengthen UC-wide academic advising. Held by a different UC campus every year, this year’s conference, Expecting the Unexpected: Practical Tools for Advising in a Changing World, was sponsored by UC Santa Cruz and was held in Monterey, California. Below, Undergraduate Adviser Katie Schramm...

April 9, 2019

Georgina Kleege performs in “Paramodernities”

The department’s own Georgina Kleege recently took part in an interdisciplinary blend of lecture and dance, Netta Yerushalmy’s “Paramodernities,” at New York Live Arts on March 14th-17th. The New York Live Arts site summarizes the performance this way: “Paramodernities boasts a radical and undefinable rethinking of the canon, involving virtually no music. Each section was created as an independent unit...

September 27, 2018

John Shoptaw Featured in Transbay Terminal Display

182 feet of LED screen wraps around the circumference of the Grand Hall in San Francisco’s new Transbay Terminal. Continuously running across the screen in letters 16 feet tall are texts from over 40 writers, including Maya Angelou, Harvey Milk, Machine Gun Kelly, and the English department’s John Shoptaw. The display, called “White Light,” was designed by Jenny Holzer, an...

September 27, 2018

Daniel Gumbiner nominated for National Book Award

Department alum Daniel Gumbiner has been longlisted for the National Book Award in fiction for his novel, The Boatbuilder. The National Book Foundation, which presents the National Book Awards, writes: “In Daniel Gumbiner’s The Boatbuilder, a twenty-eight-year-old man who has moved easily through the world sustains a concussion with lingering effects, opening a door to opioid addiction and quickly leading to...

November 20, 2017

Jane Hu in The New Yorker

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...

November 6, 2017

The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Farid Matuk and Jessica Laser

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...