Category: News

Nadia Ellis Wins the 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award

Published date April 23, 2020

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...

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

Published date March 31, 2020

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...

Habitually Holloway: In Praise of Poetry

Published date October 24, 2019

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...

Katie Schramm attends University of California Academic Advising Conference

Published date May 30, 2019

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...

Georgina Kleege performs in “Paramodernities”

Published date April 9, 2019

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...

John Shoptaw Featured in Transbay Terminal Display

Published date September 27, 2018

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...

Daniel Gumbiner nominated for National Book Award

Published date September 27, 2018

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...

Jane Hu in The New Yorker

Published date November 20, 2017

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...

The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Farid Matuk and Jessica Laser

Published date November 6, 2017

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...

Josie Saldaña wins American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Prize

Published date November 6, 2017

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...

The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Renee Gladman and Nicole Trigg

Published date October 12, 2017

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...

Jeffrey Knapp Featured at the Townsend Book Chat

Published date September 26, 2017

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...

Holloway Poetry Series Welcomes George Stanley

Published date September 28, 2016

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 welcomes Vancouver poet George Stanley. His books include Vancouver: a Poem, Gentle Northern Summer, Opening Day, The Stick, and You. He is the recipient of the 2006 Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry. Below you will find his poem,...

The 2016 Commencement Address by Professor Eric Falci

Published date June 7, 2016

The following speech was given by Professor Eric Falci to the graduates of the English Department of the University of California, Berkeley, at their Commencement, on Saturday, May 21st, 2016. Professor Falci has published two books, one on contemporary Irish poetry, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966-2010 in 2012 (Cambridge University Press,) and The Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945-2010 in 2015; he is currently working on...

English Department gets “wordy” with 2015 Big Give campaign

Published date December 7, 2015

On November 19th, 2015 UC Berkeley’s held it’s annual 24 hour fundraising drive, The Big Give. Thanks to our donors, the Department was able to raise over 350% of last years donations during this fundraiser! If you missed out on participating and want to give, please visit here. In honor of the occasion, English Department faculty and staff shared their favorite “Big Words”...