The Wheeler Column

September 27, 2018

Daniel Gumbiner nominated for National Book Award

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...

June 6, 2018

Catherine Gallagher wins American Philosophical Society Jacques Barzun Prize

The American Philosophical Society has announced that Professor Catherine Gallagher has been selected as the 2018 recipient of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for her book, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. The American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, was founded in 17 43 by Benjamin Franklin for...

April 6, 2018

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Going Public

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...

February 23, 2018

“The Luckiest Person in the World”: In Memory of Professor Alex Zwerdling

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...

December 11, 2017

A Way of Reaching Back: Mai Der Vang (’03) on the poetry of Afterland

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...

November 27, 2017

EUA’s Humans of English: Bailey Vega

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...

November 20, 2017

Jane Hu in The New Yorker

Illustration by Joan Wong English PhD candidate Jane Hu has just published a scintillating reflection on contemporary Asian-Anglophone fiction in The New Yorker‘s “Page Turner” series. In the piece, Hu explores how a clutch of contemporary Asian-Anglophone authors, from Kazuo Ishiguro and Ed Park to Tao Lin and Weike Wang, have favored narrators who project an unusual sense of detachment or impersonality, often associated with the stereotype of Oriental...

November 10, 2017

A Season in Sligo at the Yeats International Summer School

—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....

November 6, 2017

The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Farid Matuk and Jessica Laser

Each academic year, The English Department’s Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes several renowned and rising contemporary poets to campus to share and celebrate their work. This week, The Holloway Series and Mixed Blood invite you to join us for a reading and talk by Farid Matuk on Wednesday, November 8. The Mixed Blood talk, “Having Been of the Type: Taking Up Orlando Patterson’s Call...

November 6, 2017

Josie Saldaña wins American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Prize

Professor Josie Saldaña’s recent book Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States received this year’s American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Prize for the most outstanding book published in American Studies. The prize committee’s citation: The committee selected Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States from well over 100 books that we reviewed. We...

October 18, 2017

The Lure of the Archive: Life in the Margins

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...

October 12, 2017

The Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes Renee Gladman and Nicole Trigg

Each academic year, The English Department’s Holloway Series in Poetry welcomes several renowned and rising contemporary poets to campus to share and celebrate their work. This week, the series welcomed Renee Gladman reading with Nicole Trigg. Renee Gladman is the author of ten books of poetry and prose, including her series of fictional works set in the imaginary city-state of Ravicka: Event Factory...

September 26, 2017

Jeffrey Knapp Featured at the Townsend Book Chat

The Townsend Book Chat this week will feature Professor Jeffrey Knapp speaking about his new book, Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood, on Wednesday, September 27th, in the Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, from noon to 1 p.m. In Pleasing Everyone, Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and the incontrovertibly mass...

August 9, 2017

Summer Reading Series – David Marno’s Death Be Not Proud

We live, many say, in an age of mass distraction — but distraction has long been with us. In Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention, Cal English professor David Marno considers how the Renaissance poetry of John Donne offered a model for battling distraction and for inviting a state of open attentiveness that was allied with grace. Asking why Christian prayer requires attention...

July 14, 2017

Summer Reading Series – D.A. Miller’s Hidden Hitchcock

Professor D.A. Miller’s most recent book Hidden Hitchcock (University of Chicago Press, 2016) asks the reader to consider how Alfred Hitchcock works on two registers at once: as one of the most inviting filmmakers of our time, and as one of the most oblique. Miller argues that while the filmmaker’s “public style” has made him a favorite of audiences around the world,...