The Poem at the End of the Mind
In 2014, Robert Hass won the Wallace Stevens Award, the highest honor given by the Academy of American Poets. This is John Shoptaw’s piece on the occasion of Hass’s award.
Scott Saul’s Becoming Richard Pryor Featured in The New Yorker
In December 2014, HarperCollins published Professor Scott Saul’s biography Becoming Richard Pryor. The book has been reviewed widely—in publications ranging from TIME and USA Today to The Sunday Times (UK) and The Independent (UK)—but perhaps the most perceptive treatment of the book was Joan Acocella’s review for The New Yorker, posted on the magazine’s website this past week.
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Stephen Booth on Shakespeare and Cognitive Science
Recently, Stephen Booth’s work on Shakespeare was profiled by the journal Nautilus. The elaborate piece juxtaposes Booth’s approach to Shakespeare with discoveries in cognitive science over the last several decades.
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“I have never seen myself teach before”: Maura Nolan on Frederick Wiseman’s At Berkeley
Renowned documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s At Berkeley aired on PBS in January 2014, clocking in at 4 hours and 4 minutes long. The documentary centers on extended, intimate looks inside Berkeley classrooms and administrative meetings. Of these classrooms, two happened to hold classes being conducted by English Department professors: one by Professor Mitch Breitwieser and another by Professor Maura Nolan. Here,...
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New Volume of Essays Published in Honor of Stephen Booth
In February 2012 Arden Shakespeare, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, brought forth a festschrift of essays in honor of Professor Emeritus Stephen Booth: forty short essays demonstrating various sorts of close reading in honor of the closest of all close readers.
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Professor Joanna Picciotto’s Speech at the 2012 Distinguished Teaching Award Ceremony
Joanna Picciotto, Associate Professor of English, received the Distinguished Teaching Award at a ceremony on April 26, 2012. This is the 26th Distinguished Teaching Award won by members of the English Department. We have won more DTAs than any other department, a record of which we can be justly proud. Read her acceptance speech here.
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Professor Sue Schweik Discusses New Book on Disability Laws
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…]
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Professor Ian Duncan Returns from Sabbatical
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
Professor Namwali Serpell Included in Best American Short Stories 2009
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.
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English Department Faculty Summer Plans, Now Updated
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...
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Professor Lyn Hejinian’s “Positions of the Sun: Latitudes and Lucy Church Amiably”
Professor Lyn Hejinian recently delivered this year’s Gayley Lecture, an annual English Department event which showcases the current research of a distinguished faculty member. 
The text of Professor Hejinian’s lecture, which we’re delighted to reproduce below, continues her extensive body of celebrated poetic and scholarly work. Its particular style, linking poetic diction with critical analysis, might ring some bells with students who have taken one of Hejinian’s twentieth-century literature courses and encountered those writers she has most extensively studied, virtuosos in poetry and prose alike: William Carlos Williams, for one, or the subject of this lecture, Gertrude Stein.
Stein is a writer whose status as cultural icon—symbol of Parisian cosmopolitanism and open homosexuality, standard-bearer for difficult modernist writing, target of relentless parody—tends to overshadow her actual work. Hejinian admits that she doesn’t expect anyone in her 
audience to have read Lucy Church Amiably, the 1927 text which is the lecture’s centerpiece. In Stein’s own lifetime the situation was little different; she feared, Hejinian tells us, that her “identity,” the fixed public self that accompanied her celebrity, might overwhelm her “human mind,” the fluid, less definable self of everyday life. Yet Hejinian contends that Stein is important precisely because she is not alone in this predicament, and that Stein’s study of the relations between time and identity, labor and freedom, has much bearing on our own age. Her lecture recovers for us a bit of Stein’s human mind and offers a fine example of what literary scholarship can be.
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Professor Scott Saul Wins American Cultures Teaching Award
The English Department is delighted to announce that Professor Scott Saul is this year’s recipient of The American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award. This campus-wide award, given by the American Cultures Center, “recognizes the use of pedagogical developments to enhance the students’ learning experience in the American Cultures classroom.” Professor Saul was awarded this distinction for the ENGL 166AC course he taught this past Fall, “Race and Performance in the 20th c. U.S.”
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New Professors Look Back At Their First Year
As the end of the semester approaches, the English Department blog is looking back at the past year. Since one of our first posts announced the new faculty who had arrived at Berkeley this year, we checked back in with Professor Emily Thornbury and Professor Namwali Serpell to see what their first years had been like. In what follows, Professors...
Professor Mitch Breitwieser wins Campus’s Highest Teaching Honor, the 2009 Distinguished Teaching Award
“When teaching, it’s tempting to make it seem as if one’s ideas came effortlessly, and to hide the truth, which is that coming up to a blind wall is a permanent feature of everyone’s intellectual life,” writes the English Department’s latest winner of the campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in his teaching philosophy. But,” as Mitch Breitwieser reflects, “such an apparent facility on the teacher’s part can reinforce a student’s feeling that, because he or she is struggling when those around seem not to be, there must be some intrinsic personal deficiency. And feeling that way greatly reduces the chance that the intellectual problem will be solved.” He therefore tells his students, both in class and in office hours, that “academic success depends upon properly understanding that encounter with difficulty”—because failure “most often comes not from a lack of intelligence or preparation, but from a wrong choice concerning how to respond to having come up against that wall.”
Professor Robert Hass’s “Green Fire, the Still Point, and an Oak Grove: Some Reflections on the Humanities and the Environment.”
On Thursday, March 12, 2009, Professor Robert Hass gave the first of this year’s Faculty Research Lectures, the full text of which follows here. AN OAK GROVE Thank you. It is an honor and a bit daunting to be here today. Since I don’t actually do research so much as read around to try to put my thoughts in order,...