The Wheeler Column

October 16, 2019

Fall 2019 The Pleasures of Allegory and its Significance for an Aspiring Medievalist

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...

August 15, 2019

In memory of Professor Donald Friedman

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….

June 7, 2019

Writing in the Digital Age

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...

June 7, 2019

The Pre-Modern Information Age

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...

June 7, 2019

Medieval Sexualities

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,...

June 7, 2019

The Berkeley Revolution

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...

May 30, 2019

Katie Schramm attends University of California Academic Advising Conference

The University of California Academic Advising Conference is an annual conference aimed at providing professional development to strengthen UC-wide academic advising. Held by a different UC campus every year, this year’s conference, Expecting the Unexpected: Practical Tools for Advising in a Changing World, was sponsored by UC Santa Cruz and was held in Monterey, California. Below, Undergraduate Adviser Katie Schramm...

April 15, 2019

Mark Danner wins 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship

Mark Danner, a professor in both the English and Journalism departments, is one of five Berkeleyans to become a 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow. Read more here.

April 9, 2019

Georgina Kleege performs in “Paramodernities”

The department’s own Georgina Kleege recently took part in an interdisciplinary blend of lecture and dance, Netta Yerushalmy’s “Paramodernities,” at New York Live Arts on March 14th-17th. The New York Live Arts site summarizes the performance this way: “Paramodernities boasts a radical and undefinable rethinking of the canon, involving virtually no music. Each section was created as an independent unit...

April 5, 2019

Namwali Serpell in the News

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...

February 28, 2019

Catherine Gallagher Interviewed by UC Berkeley Emeriti Association

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...

January 3, 2019

Amanda Jo Goldstein Wins MLA Prize for a First Book

The MLA Prize for a First Book has been awarded to Amanda Jo Goldstein for her book Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life. The committee’s citation for Goldstein’s book reads: Ambitious, learned, and extraordinarily precise, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life magnificently reshapes our understanding of life and the forms through which it is given to...

November 29, 2018

To Tell the Truth … To Be Seen: Poet Javier Zamora (’12) on Unaccompanied

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,...

October 12, 2018

Robert Hass receives 2018 Truman Capote Award

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...

September 27, 2018

John Shoptaw Featured in Transbay Terminal Display

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...