In what follows, graduate student Monica Soare reports about a recent meeting of the department’s Nineteenth-Century and Beyond Working Group, which hosted Professor Mary Favret from the University of Indiana. They discussed a chapter in Professor Favret’s new book War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. [Read full post…]
Graduate students Charles Legere and Javier Huerta both live in Oakland and both write poetry. Now, after being approached by the website deepoakland.org, they’ve written some poetry about living in Oakland. [Read full post…]
READ MORE Graduate Students Explore Vitality of Oakland Through Poetry
As one of the larger departments at UC Berkeley (there are roughly 700 majors), the English Department can be a daunting place for an undergraduate trying to navigate the requirements of the major. While the Department has an Undergraduate Adviser on staff as well as a professor who counsels students, there is another resource for students that is somewhat less intimidating but no less “official,” namely the English Undergraduate Association (EUA).[Read full post…]
In what follows, Tiffany Tsao, who received her PhD in English this past Spring, reports on her life as a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech. She begins with an epigraph from Dante which, she feels, encapsulates her experience so far.
…what I sing will be that second kingdom,
in which the human soul is cleansed of sin,
becoming worthy of ascent to Heaven.
(Purgatorio, Canto I.4-6)[Read full post…]
READ MORE Notes from Postdoctoral Purgatory: A Recent PhD Reports
In what follows, graduate student Natalia Cecire reports on a recent poetry reading with Maurice Scully and Anne Tardos.[Read full post…]
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READ MORE Holloway Reading Series: Anne Tardos and Maurice Scully
In what follows graduate student Rosa Martinez gives a brief account of the discussion of Professor Sue Schweik’s The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public that took place at University Press Book on September 8, 2009.[Read full post…]
READ MORE Professor Sue Schweik Discusses New Book on Disability Laws
Graduate student Catherine Cronquist Browning attended the colloquium the English Department hosted to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the poet Robert Burns’ birth. What follows is a short summary of the day.
Five leading scholars in the field of Scottish Romanticism, Leith Davis, Janet Sorensen, Steve Newman, Ian Duncan, and Carol McGuirk, delivered current work on Burns to an audience of assorted faculty, graduate students, undergradutes, and other members of the department community. In fact, Wheeler 300 was packed full of eager listeners, with those who came later finding seats on tables and the floor to enjoy the rich program!
Our first blog post of this year detailed some reading recommendations which members of our department had read over the summer. Having just recently returned from a year-long sabbatical, Professor Ian Duncan supplied a wonderful list as well. What follows is a brief account of Professor Duncan’s doings in Turkey interspersed with a bevy of titles which might catch your eye. [Read full post…]
The view looking out over the Bosphorus and our local Greek Orthodox church from the house where Professor Duncan stayed in Istanbul
The English Department proudly congratulates Professor Namwali Serpell on her inclusion in this year’s edition of Best American Short Stories. In what follows, Professor Serpell discusses her story, entitled “Muzungu,” as well as the relationship between her creative writing endeavors and her work as a literary critic.
READ MORE Professor Namwali Serpell Included in Best American Short Stories 2009
What follows is a redaction of a report which recent English major graduate Caitlin O’Donnell wrote describing her experiences working on poverty issues in the Caribbean. Caitlin addresses the relationship between the “theoretical” study of literature and the “praxis” of the fight against global poverty.
Caitlin with two participants of the Barbados YWCA day camp
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As an English major with a minor in Global Poverty and Practices, I am on a quest to achieve the kind of praxis emphasized in my study of Global Poverty and Practices in conjunction with the study of English literature. I know that the longer I study and practice the two together, the more linkages I will be able to make and the closer I will […]
READ MORE English Major Links Theory and Practice in Service Trip
To start up the English Department blog for the new academic year, we have asked some of the department’s graduate students and faculty to reflect on the reading they have done over the summer and to recommend a few titles (either academic or popular) that they enjoyed. Kea Anderson returned to Moby Dick this summer but also recommends The White...
The devastating cuts to the University of California by the State now mean many different things to the diverse faculty at Berkeley. For some it has meant the imminent demise of the possibility of a great university that is also a public university with wide access. For others it poses a threat to intellectual diversity and excellence. Others feel that,...
As the spring semester draws the academic year to a close and the students start dispersing for home and summer jobs, the English Department’s faculty members are busy with plans and projects of their own. Many students wonder what it is that professors do in the long summer break, and what follows is a brief account of the way in...
READ MORE English Department Faculty Summer Plans, Now Updated
Nuruddin Farah—among the foremost of contemporary African writers, author of numerous novels including the trilogies Variations on the Theme of An African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun, and recipient of the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature—delivered this year’s English Department commencement address at the Greek Theatre on May 16. You’ll find the text below the fold.
READ MORE Commencement Address by Nuruddin Farah: “A Fork in the Fork of the Footpath”
