Alumni and Faculty in the News: Links.
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:
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.
In what follows, graduate student John Lurz reports on a recent event held at University Press Books at which Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer spoke about their new book, 
In what follows, graduate student Andrea Lankin reports on a recent talk given by Professor Vincent Gillespie on “Meat, Metaphor and Mysticism,” a provocative and enigmatic title for a talk that explores the role of the body in medieval culture. 
This past semester, under the leadership of Professor Eric Falci, the department inaugurated a graduate student publication workshop. Designed as a forum for graduate students to receive feedback on their work-in-progress as they prepare that work for eventual publication, the workshop met five times in the fall 2009 semester, and plans to meet six or seven times this spring. 
In what follows, Professor Nadia Ellis describes the singular role the English Department at Berkeley has played for alumnus Charlie Hallowell (pictured right, with his daughter Matilda) who owns two successful artisanal pizza restaurants in Oakland.
In what follows, graduate student Rebecca Munson gives a brief account of the talk Professor John Kerrigan recently gave on “Shakespeare, Oaths and Vows.”
On Monday, November 9, the English department continued its series, “Conversations with Distinguished Alumni,” in a discussion with alumnus David Corvo ’72, who is currently the Executive Producer of the prime time news magazine Dateline NBC. He was joined by Department Chair Sam Otter and Professor Namwali Serpell, who spoke with him about the the relationship between his study of English at Berkeley and his success as a broadcast journalist.