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,...
In the spring semester of 2017, Tessa Rissacher took Prof. Scott Saul’s American Studies H110, “The Bay Area in the Seventies.” It changed her life. Students in the course worked on research projects that became part of an extraordinary website and cultural archive, “The Berkeley Revolution.” The website traces the social and cultural transformations centered in Berkeley during the 1960s...
Namwali Serpell has been getting international attention for her recently released novel, The Old Drift. Here is a small sample of reviews: The New York Times Again The New York Times, this review by Salman Rushdie The Times of London Mwebantu The Los Angeles Times The Boston Globe The Guardian You can read an excerpt on Literary Hub. Interest in...
Catherine Gallagher has been interviewed by the University of California Berkeley Emeriti Association (UCBEA) as part of a pilot for a new program, the Legacy Project. The project involves video recording of emeriti faculty for the purpose of preserving the history and accomplishments of its distinguished faculty. More specifically, the Legacy Project has the purpose of producing video interviews with faculty who are entering...
READ MORE Catherine Gallagher Interviewed by UC Berkeley Emeriti Association
UC Berkeley alumnus Javier Zamora (’12) published his first book of poetry, Unaccompanied, in 2017. Fleeing a civil war and gang violence in El Salvador, Zamora’s parents immigrated to the United States when he was two, leaving him with his grandparents until his own migration, alone, at age nine. The poems of Unaccompanied explore that family history, its larger contexts,...
READ MORE To Tell the Truth … To Be Seen: Poet Javier Zamora (’12) on <em>Unaccompanied</em>
The Truman Capote Award Ceremony will take place at 4 p.m. Oct. 17 in the Old Capitol Senate Chamber. The event will feature remarks by Robert Hass and a reception in the Old Capitol Museum. Both events are open to the public. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass won the 2018 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin...
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...
READ MORE John Shoptaw Featured in Transbay Terminal Display
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...
The author, scholar, and MLA member Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke with the MLA’s executive director, Paula Krebs, in October 2017, after he had been awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. His debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. PAULA KREBS: Congratulations on winning a MacArthur. Do you have plans? VIET THANH NGUYEN: I run a blog called...
English Professor Alex Zwerdling passed away on May 16, 2017 at the age of 84. Author of five acclaimed books, including the just-published The Rise of the Memoir and recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, and National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowships, Professor Zwerdling joined UC Berkeley’s English Department in 1961. He was a key figure in shaping the department over the five decades...
READ MORE “The Luckiest Person in the World”: In Memory of Professor Alex Zwerdling
In 2017, UC Berkeley English alumna Mai Der Vang (’03) published her first book of poetry, Afterland, which recounts the Hmong exodus from Laos after U.S. forces abandoned their Secret War, and subsequent refugee experiences of Hmong exiles and their descendants in the United States. The book was selected by Carolyn Forché as the winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman...
READ MORE A Way of Reaching Back: Mai Der Vang (’03) on the poetry of Afterland
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...
—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
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...
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
