Category: News

In March 2010, we wrote about the return to Berkeley of the wildly successful play The Domestic Crusaders, by Wajahat Ali. Ali’s play was recently performed at the premiere theater venue of  the nation’s capital, the Kennedy Center — and to quite a response.  This video from the production shows both the first act  and Wajahat’s narration of the play’s Berkeley origin.  Additionally, the script of the play will be published by McSweeny’s next month; copies can be ordered here.

The English Department congratulates Professor Anne-Lise François, whose Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford University Press, 2007) was recently named the winner of the 2010 René Wellek Prize.    Read full post…

For the third year in a row, the English Department has teamed up with the Aurora Theater, located on Addison Street in Berkeley, to offer a special event to the Berkeley community: in conjunction with a performance at the Aurora, Berkeley professors gather for a panel that discusses the play for an audience of alumni, faculty, students and other interested theater-goers.  Read full post…

Georgina Kleege, Lecturer in the English Department, will be the guest author at the Berkeley Writers at Work fall 2010 event, on Wednesday, October 6 from noon to 1:30 in the Morrison Library, 101 Doe Library.  The event is free and open to the public. Read full post…

One of the most exciting things about the beginning of the semester this Fall is the launch of a new opportunity in the English Department for undergraduates: the Peter and Megan Chernin Mentorship Program. Read full post…

Though the campus might be quiet during the summer, English Department students are keeping busy. Matthew Sergi, a doctoral candidate in the department, is presenting his new play in San Francisco — two weekends only!: Read details…

Professors Cecil Giscombe and Anne-Lise Francois each received awards for their recent work. Read full post…

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.