by Kim Chernin The perennial question about memory: how much should we trust it? I’ve been asked to write about my favorite English teacher at Berkeley in the early 1960s, but after fifty-six years I know my memory might play tricks, might even make things up in an effort to be true to what happened. Memory is probably the original...
READ MORE Alumna and writer Kim Chernin remembers Dorothee Finkelstein
by Natalie Stone Although adversity is often considered a routine condition of human life, rarely does it forge an academic and personal strength as resolute as that of Professor Dorothee Finkelstein, the second woman to be tenured in the English Department. Escaping the Russian Revolution as a young child and later immigrating to Britain to escape the threat of Nazi-dominated...
READ MORE Forgotten Chapters of Department History: #2 Professor Dorothee Finkelstein
By Emma Campbell, Kahyun Koh, and Anya Vertanessian Born in Chicago on June 11th, 1911, Josephine Miles was an acclaimed poet, professor, literary critic, and a vital part of the Berkeley community. In 1947, she became the first woman to be awarded tenure in the English Department, eighty years after its founding, and she was the sole tenured woman for...
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by Catherine Flynn Ella Young was a complex character and central to the building up of Celtic Studies at Berkeley. During her ten years as James D. Phelan Lecturer in Irish Myth and Lore, she gave lectures at Columbia, Smith, Vassar and Mills. As a woman holding a prestigious lectureship, she was exceptional for her time. However, she emerged at...
READ MORE Professor Catherine Flynn reflects on Ella Young and the history of Irish Studies
by Kamila Kaminska-Palarczyk The first woman to hold an endowed lectureship in the English Department was a celebrity. She entered the department through the Celtic Studies program, the first degree-granting program of its kind in the country, created in 1911. Two decades later the program appointed Irish writer Ella Young as the Phelan Memorial Lecturer in Celtic Mythology and Literature....
READ MORE Forgotten Chapters of Department History: #1 Ella Young’s Lectureship
By Amanda Styles Among the many female faculty members of the English department throughout its history, Lucy Sprague Mitchell stands out as the one who never focused her studies in English. She majored in philosophy during her undergraduate education at Radcliffe (the female “annex” to Harvard). Sprague’s six years in the Berkeley English Department as an Assistant Professor came about...
READ MORE Lucy Sprague: First Woman on the Berkeley Faculty (1906-1912)
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...
READ MORE Nadia Ellis Wins the 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award
Experiencing an English 190: Research Seminar Stephanie Reyna EUA Vice President English and Anthropology Major Going into the required research seminar can seem daunting in the beginning. The idea of having to develop an original argument for your topic can stop any writer in their tracks but it is called a seminar for a reason. You are prepared...
Musings on “Middle School” Media: Berkeley’s Young Adult Literature Decal by Andrea Aquino We read Milton’s Paradise Lost, we read Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, we read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, we read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice — and the list only goes on. We read countless works, from novels to poetry to drama, as part of...
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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...
Fall 2019 The Pleasures of Allegory and its Significance for an Aspiring Medievalist By Amanda Styles 2019 EUA Treasurer, English Major, Medieval Studies Minor Like many American high school students, I think my first conscious experience with allegory, other than on a vocabulary sheet, was with the teaching of George Orwell’s 1945 novel, Animal Farm. In my sophomore...
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Professor Emeritus Donald Friedman died on June 10, 2019 of respiratory failure. He is survived by his wife of sixty years, Stephanie, and his sons Elliot and Gabriel. There will be a memorial service for Professor Friedman at 2pm on December 13, 2019, at the Women’s Faculty Club. For more information….
Vikram Chandra describes the experience of watching one of his novels come to dramatic life in a television series as “surreal.” Already a well-known writer, with two novels and a collection of stories to his name, Chandra was approached in 2014 by Netflix with a proposal to base a series on his second novel, Sacred Games. The novel takes place...
Like many young people, Bernardo Hinojosa went to Europe last summer. But rather than backpacking and seeing the sights, Bernardo engaged in a different kind of tourism: he traveled from library to library, looking at medieval manuscripts and documents. As a medievalist in training – he is currently in his fourth year of completing a joint PhD in English and...
Last summer, Berkeley senior English major Arielle Moscati got two new library cards and fulfilled a long held dream: she researched her senior thesis in the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A Los Angeles native, Arielle transferred to Berkeley from community college as a junior. Right away, she found her academic passion: the Middle Ages,...
